Lecture on Subversive Humor and Philosophy

[Music] so yeah thank you very much again chris for having accepted the invitation uh as i told you i usually start with some introductory notes about the person i&#39;m interviewing but i just leave it up to you as a first question to introduce yourself and like your academic intellectual career or background let&#39;s say sure uh and thank you for reaching out to me uh to speak with me about this um i know you&#39;re interested in humor um and i am as well i got interested in thinking about humor i think probably if my parents aren&#39;t lying to me when i was about five and i made my first joke it was a pun um we were eating scrambled eggs and i had the fork sort of on the teetering on the edge of the plate like a catapult the eggs were on the tines of the fork and i accidentally hit the supposedly accidental and the eggs flew everywhere and i said oh an explosion and my parents heard eggsplosion explosion okay explain to me the pun and i loved how it felt i i don&#39;t remember i certainly didn&#39;t create that joke it was i believe it&#39;s called a spoonerism unintentional but from then on i started to understand what jokes were and of course i tried to make them and i loved the feeling that my family had and laughing at that moment and so that got me interested in humor i&#39;d say since i was five and then i didn&#39;t really come back to it so far as formal analysis until uh grad school uh i wanted to write about the philosophy of laughter um the my advisor suggested i not do that because it&#39;s not marketable uh at the time that was probably reasonable this was around 1998 1999 so decided to cover go into consciousness studies but it wasn&#39;t until grad school for the phd that i found connections between humor and um issues of political matters of christ say again which year was it like you&#39;re you&#39;re would have been 2009. all right around 2010 i took a political philosophy class and i was already interested in frederick douglass from my back history and in my i was a civil war buff which is a weird thing to i guess to admit uh but i was really interested in in frederick douglass and i was younger i would read freddie dallas i didn&#39;t understand it but it it the things that he said pissed me off um in a way that the way he was treated the way he described being treated i it was didn&#39;t didn&#39;t sink in uh and it was in the later that i recognized he utilized humor uh frederick douglass he used humor in the worst situations possible being enslaved parallels to [Music] those who suffer through the the holocaust jewish prisoners victor frankel has a wonderful account of this in man&#39;s search for meaning in those two situations and if you can find and use humor in situations like that and as a means to confront um violent systemic and constant oppression well then it seems there&#39;s something more to just laughing there&#39;s something more to humor than merely frivolity and that there i made a connection between and found an interest in um how humor can be used as a means to subvert uh certain kinds of oppression and this that my dissertation was on subversive humor but primarily against oppression that is uh what gene harvey calls civilized oppression it&#39;s more covert it&#39;s sort of hidden it&#39;s implicit biases that are perpetuating and yet have um oftentimes as negative effects as overt and explicit oppression and anyway i was already working at the time so i was able to focus on what i wanted instead of you know picking something that would be marketable so i focused on philosophy of humor and i was very happy to have a chair of my dissertation be open to that and now i teach at uh santa barbara city college where it looks like this outside all right but are you also teaching humor like on humor philosophy humor there is not a class specific devoted to philosophy to philosophy of humor but i incorporate it in all of my classes so i&#39;ll be teaching class on tuesday and the introduction of the class will be to introduce philosophy by way of a philosophical attitude with a humorous attitude um and i think because most people don&#39;t know in the united states i&#39;m not sure how it is in berlin but in the united states um philosophy is not a required subject in high school in fact most people don&#39;t know what philosophy is including uh very public personalities politicians and so forth and i think this is a detriment so students coming in don&#39;t even know what the word means ultimately uh but you know it&#39;s not entirely their fault most philosophers debate about what the word means say again how about ethics i mean do you have like ethics courses and stuff oh yes yeah certainly yeah yeah all right and there&#39;s connections there as well all right um so chris my question is that i mean like um even given your interest um in plenty of socio-political issues from power as you said to marginalization to oppression and uh so on and so forth why humor why not irony that&#39;s a good question and i don&#39;t think they&#39;re always easily separable i think you could be ironic without being humorous not all irony is funny uh and not all humor is ironic uh but there or so i mentioned frederick douglass um i think there&#39;s a there&#39;s an appropriate time and place for the use of humor there&#39;s an easy there&#39;s a too easy let me rephrase it can be too easily misinterpreted as purely frivolous whereas irony can have a bit more biting edge and this fourth of july speech um you know this is this is 1850 i forgot the date it was before uh he was freed frederick douglass uh and the the the argument that he was giving is that he&#39;s a human being and not not be treated as a slave but you can&#39;t make that argument it&#39;s absurd to have to publicly directly explicitly make an argument that i&#39;m a human being and should be treated as such and he says in this speech this is not a time for argument this is a time for um scorching irony and it&#39;s angry he&#39;s he&#39;s furious and justifiably so and so i i think i focused on humor because there wasn&#39;t a whole lot of focus on it that&#39;s one reason there&#39;s there&#39;s some work on irony and its use in political satire for instance but there&#39;s something about humor that is more uh collaborative i think than um even many instances of irony i think you still find some collaboration with irony especially if you think of it in terms of socratic irony where you know the interlocutors are required to participate they&#39;re required to uh give their view because socrates is not giving his for instance and there&#39;s the socratic method in general where teachers try to pull out or reduce as the root of that term education is from socrates perspective but with humor it&#39;s i think perhaps the most collaborative uh art form and i would call it an art form but as with a lot of art political art banksy type art for instance it isn&#39;t just purely aesthetic and so that collaborative element is opens up others uh in a way that more direct approaches certainly direct argumentation and perhaps in many cases even irony is insufficient i increase there are lots of arguments about about the reasons um humor has been apparently excluded to logic to a large extent from the history of philosophy i mean philosophers are basically ironic and humorous and um [Music] one of the reasons is actually that the philosophers are serious and humorous by nature not a serious thing you agree with that um it depends if i can take give you a philosophical reaction aristotelian it depends it&#39;s both yes and no depends on what you mean by uh sirius because the term is ambiguous um there&#39;s a wonderful quote from virgin russell who if you look at a number of his quotes and i&#39;ve forgotten who outlined this it may have been um stephen gimble it was a wonderful book on uh a new theory of philos of humor on cleverness um but he gives a list of comments um it may have been dworkin i can&#39;t remember who it was now but a list of comments that russell makes that could stand as comedic performances and russell he was funny but is a very british dry wit uh he says the distinction between humor and seriousness or rather seriousness is not the opposite of humor uh being solemn that&#39;s the opposite of humor so it is true philosophers are serious and they&#39;re they take their uh they take their play with ideas if you want they take that place seriously and i think they take it seriously in a similar way that professional athletes take their playing their sport seriously musicians take their playing of their instruments and it is interesting john morrell i think put it wonderfully it&#39;s it&#39;s curious that musicians they play their instruments they don&#39;t work them right we&#39;re not working the sport we&#39;re not working our instruments they&#39;re they&#39;re playing them but that play doesn&#39;t necessitate frivolity lack of importance or seriousness so comedians who my goodness if you look at what goes into creating jokes it is it&#39;s a very long arduous uh and serious practice and this is especially the case if the content of the humor is also uh you know issues of oppression if we go back to dick gregory richard pryor uh ellen claycorn element degeneres uh there&#39;s any number of people you can look at oh they&#39;re using uh humor in a meet as a means to address serious matters that doesn&#39;t mean they&#39;re being morose or solemn nor does it mean they&#39;re bringing frittles see i don&#39;t think it has to be either or and i think this is true of philosophers and particularly with thought experiments look at the history of thought experiments they are they&#39;re not frivolous and they&#39;re often about serious matters but there&#39;s a bit of oftentimes humor and um playfulness involved with them because they&#39;re playing with ideas effective the root of thought experiment uh the german root for it gadoken uh experiment or gedonken heel i guess is also sometimes used which is thought to play as as ernst mock i think referred to it and conducted spiel is just a fantastic word to say by itself it&#39;s already a little bit light um and so no my law my short answer is no i do not agree that humor and seriousness are completely opposed all right um i could hear chris there are relatively clear legal remedies to over depression but it&#39;s not the case with covert oppression where the psychological harms and results in legal and economic exclusion are every bit as real but caused by concealed mechanism subtly and systematically employed and of course does it mean that you believe humor can be a tool mainly or perhaps solely against covert oppression and can you please elaborate um yes uh let&#39;s see i don&#39;t think uh humor is only useful or efficacious against covert the hidden sorts the systemic uh again the civilized oppression oppression that&#39;s perpetuated by well-meaning people i think it&#39;s probably more effective with respect to that sort and that&#39;s the sort i focus on in most of what i&#39;ve written although frederick douglass again is not dealing with oh covert hidden oppressions he&#39;s dealing with systemic violent in-your-face constant harms that are both psychological and physically tormenting and yet in his autobiographies in multiple instances he notes how he sees the importance of finding the funny side of life and and using humor as he did in a number of occasions in his speeches he uses humor in in a way that is potentially threatening to him it&#39;s dangerous for someone in his situation in the 1850s 1860s and beyond even during reconstruction to um expose and critically uh evaluate and publicly do so uh those who are his oppressors and so he uses humor and there are a lot of instances in which humor seems to be successful um against the the overfort force of oppression in fact there are a number of cases where you look at how those who perpetuate overt in your face oppression like the nazis did feared humor and unfortunately we see this still today in turkey uh erdogan for instance who clearly fears humor i believe it was a couple years ago i think it was erdogan who tried to punish a german comedian if i&#39;m not mistaken for making fun of him i mean this is this has a history to it there were joke courts i believe they were called in nazi germany where you could not make fun of adolf you couldn&#39;t name your pets your dog or your horse adolf because that&#39;s seen as diminishing him you couldn&#39;t make jokes at adolf&#39;s at hitler&#39;s expense uh you could be punished and possibly even killed that shows at the very least the force of humor and and the use of humor even against the most explicit and violent sorts of oppression so again the short answer is no humor can be used and has been uh against as a resistance against overt and covert chris you call subversive humor that which is employed by or on behalf of those who have been continually marginalized when effectively use such humor i&#39;m quoting you such humor can foster the inclination and even desire to listen to others and if only for brief moments adopt their point of view what constitutes actually subversive humor um i know that&#39;s a big question that&#39;s the whole phd thesis yes that can&#39;t be summed up i mean i can i have subsequently rethought that or come back to that because the term sub verse of humor subversive implies a kind of undermining but it could also imply a reaction from those below so to speak you&#39;re trying to subvert but it&#39;s also coming from below you can think of it in terms of outside of the the margins of the borderlands of of a given society outside of the hegemonic centers and sometimes um and the way that i typically use it is um from those or on behalf of those who lack power um in the sort of slogan sense it&#39;s a punching up versus a punching down and i think that phrase like most phrases that might have originally had a lot of force a lot of punch to it it began it gets overused and becomes almost cliche um i think that&#39;s potentially problematic but ultimately that&#39;s if you want to sum up what subversive humor is it&#39;s it&#39;s punching from below the problem is who gets to interpret that because there are those who are arguing they&#39;re subverting you know unjust power structures that people who see themselves as being oppressed and they&#39;re using humor as a means to attack those in power and currently what you find in the united states is a lot of white angry heterosexual males who see themselves as oppressed and you can see this online and they admit they&#39;ll use uh humor to try to you know undermine the pa what they see as the power structures the problem here is they&#39;re objectively mistaken about where the power lies they are objectively in the sense of there&#39;s publicly available data that shows that they are not the ones who are being oppressed um and that gets into some also that gets into a lot of difficult terrain here because who gets to interpret that um and so i believe it was milo yiannopoulos if you&#39;re familiar with this fellow he also takes on this mantle as being a kind of socratic gadfly which i found interesting uh and he sees himself as a subversive humorist and uh the problem is of course the use of humor that he employs is not one of bringing to consciousness stereotypes and then showing that they&#39;re flawed and problematic and attempting to un undermine an unjust status quo the humor that he uses and many of those who are sometimes referred to as the alt-right in the united states it&#39;s not used to demonstrate that stereotypes are flawed in fact it&#39;s using them to maintain them it&#39;s humor that&#39;s used to perpetuate a status quo that actually benefits those who claim that they&#39;re being oppressed and i think one of the if i can use another slogan i apologize because i don&#39;t like slogans but this has become one for those who have experienced and have possessed privilege seeing equality the rising of equality feels like oppression i actually didn&#39;t get that right but i think you know the the phrase i&#39;m trying to say some people who have privilege and have had it for extended periods of time when they recognize others are now being granted similar basic rights that&#39;s viewed as ah now my rights are being taken away i&#39;m being oppressed uh and i think that&#39;s largely where we are with a large segment of population united states today it&#39;s like it&#39;s a somewhat scary time all [Music] civilized oppression silence discredited stripped of powers of moral appeal and deprived of the interpersonal conditions necessary for maintaining self-respect i quote you subversive humor can raise consciousness about the lived experiences of those suffering under systemic oppression and foster world traveling subversive humor encourages audiences especially those who have contribute those who contribute to what john harvey calls civilized oppression to playfully travel across worlds and carry along with the perspectives of the marginalized is it an appropriate expectation for those marginalized or from those marginalized to incorporate humor in their liberation yes that&#39;s an excellent question that&#39;s another thing i&#39;ve struggled with because again with humor there is embedded within it there&#39;s ambiguity in most cases there&#39;s um the need for audiences to participate in the understanding of what&#39;s going on with most humor the humerus the wit whether it&#39;s aversive or not is lying upon an audience sort of filling in and that&#39;s again there&#39;s the collaborative element of it which makes humor so interesting and so forceful and impactful but also it&#39;s the potential worry because it could be misinterpreted very easily um by audiences and and by um third party bystanders to the extent that those are present there&#39;s also the concern that when you are writing and thinking and perhaps even suggesting the use of humor as a mode of resistance that that could be interpreted as oh you seem to be saying that those who are systematically oppressed and systemically oppressed ought to just laugh it off ought to just as as douglas himself says you know find the funny side of it all um or immediately the monty python pops into mine always left the bright side of life i i think there&#39;s a distinction i try to make that clear i&#39;m mostly theorizing about how humor can has and can be utilized as a mode of resistance which is quite different than saying to an individual who is oppressed or depressed whatever the case in in that case as well that you should just turn that crown upside down and you should use laughter i think that&#39;s very difficult terrain uh and i i don&#39;t think i would point that out to somebody who is suffering that you should just use humor which of course doesn&#39;t mean we shouldn&#39;t be analyzing the way the humor can and has worked you just briefly talked about the different interpretations of different meanings of seriousness but um in a large part of your book uh subversive humor you talk about spirit of seriousness and i that it&#39;s different from seriousness as we normally understand could you please um could you please um elaborate i mean you say the spirit of seriousness ontological expansiveness and stereotyping all play a central role in perpetuation of civilized oppression could you please um elaborate on this spirit of seriousness and his relation to this suppressive humor you&#39;re defining yes i think that that is key here um in the concept of spirit of seriousness i get from jean-paul simon to bevoir louis gordon existentialist philosophers and there&#39;s hints of it in friedrich nietzsche in his spirit of gravity and nietzsche&#39;s conception of use of levity and lightheartedness in response to that but it goes back even further i think to arthur schopenhauer of all people and if you just look at a picture of arthur schopenhauer any picture about the schopenhauer humor uh and that face are incongruous that he he actually focused on humor uh and one of the conceptions he sees of humor has a benefit it is a kind of recognition of the limits of our reason and he sees the serious person against whom a lot of humor is a tool to crack open the serious person is not the one who is solemn it&#39;s not the one who is you know this is important and i i need you know stop bothering me with this frivolity i&#39;m taking this as very significant to me but the serious person for schopenhauer is one who feels overly certain and unjustifiably certain that the way they perceive the world concepts through which they perceive the world are absolute unquestioned that kind of seriousness is what i think people like simone de bevoir jean-paul sartre and lewis gordon referred to as a kind of absolutism maybe you can refer to it as dogmatism it is an unquestioned attitude where we look for and rationalize our experiences in the world deny uh the perspectives of others whenever they might come in conflict with our presumed values which we take to either be absolute because of nature absolute because of god which is often the case or even absolute due to to culture uh and the spirit of seriousness is something that dis inclines us to see from alternative perspectives and a humorous attitude goes the opposite direction um think of the spirit of seriousness as tied to tragedy versus a kind of a humorous attitude tied with this openness of comedy of divergent thinking as opposed to convergent thinking john morrell has a wonderful take on this um in his work on comedy and tragedy and humor or laughter where he delineates the distinction in a comedic and a tragic world view um and so one of the things that humorists can do is is reveal that the hierarchical structures the societal structures the rules that are set in place are not absolute and they&#39;re not absolute because there&#39;s a history to them they&#39;re contingent as opposed to necessary but what de bevoir says simone de bevoir in the ethics of ambiguity which i think is still very relevant text for today what the oppressor does and when the oppressor succeeds is to get the oppressed to perceive their situation as if it were a natural state as if it were as if it couldn&#39;t be questioned um uh as if it were like an earthquake or a tornado you&#39;re not oppressed by tornadoes oppression is how humans interact with other humans but if you make your situation your status in life um wherever you are as a kind of necessity invoked either by brought about either by the laws of nature or it&#39;s a kind of supernatural mystification as you as as i would put it from god then it cannot be questioned because and in that sense you get the oppressed to accept and not question their situation uh plato comes to mind with his myth of the medals this is just how you&#39;re born and there&#39;s nothing that can be done about it it&#39;s not human actions that have put you in this oppressive state it&#39;s just the natural state of the world um we might see a version of this with the caste system in india for example as well and the humorist is pointing out that this is all contingent it&#39;s not necessary and if it&#39;s contingent and not necessary then it can be it could be changed it could be amended and here you have a distinction um uh with subversive humor and humor that might be considered gallows humor humor in response to we&#39;re talking about existentialists the inevitability of death a lot of you know woody allen films for instance a kind of existentialist dread uh and his humor is a response to that that&#39;s not subversive humor because the subversive humor humorist is using um lightheartedness playfulness to change something in the world the humorist who&#39;s addressing the another inevitability of death is using that to change their mindset their psychological reaction to an inevitability but if you can make one&#39;s position in society seem inevitable there&#39;s no reason then there&#39;s no hope uh for one to try to undermine it or change it sure proof based on that based on this and this definition of this spirit of seriousness all that you uh very clearly talked about now and just um in the in the book can we come to a correlation between or let me reformulate it like subversive humor confront serious matters but in a playful manner that fosters creative and critical thinking and cultivates a desire and school skill for recognizing and quoting you for recognizing incongruities between our prefers ideals and a reality that does not meet those standards and of course are those in power then necessarily more serious and less sensitive to incongruities ah yes very very good question there&#39;s a lot of hmm there are a lot of different routes to answer that uh i&#39;ll try to go a shorter route yes they those with power those with privilege those in the center of a society are typically less inclined to recognize incongruities and hear incongruities in the sense of moral social incongruities dealing with questions of justice and the reason that is it&#39;s not and by the way i&#39;m not going to engage in the spirit of seriousness myself by saying if one is in a position of power they&#39;re constitutionally incapable of recognizing incongruity because to do so again i think would fit that kind of absolutist perspective and it would it would undermine the efficacy of subversive humor which one of the goals of subversive humor is to change the minds of other people in particular those with power and so the reason subversive humor against co covert hidden oppression civilized oppression i think is such a useful tool is because the people who are perpetuating oppressive systems if you ask them uh most of us today and i include i said us here because i think i&#39;m part of that um dominant group in the sense that i&#39;m privileged in many respects but we [Music] if asked would say i&#39;m an egalitarian i&#39;m for equal rights for everyone i&#39;m against oppression i&#39;m against racism and yet our actions uh belie that our actions are implicit biases and i&#39;ve taken the implicit association test and i was not happy with the results um my and there&#39;s a number of studies that show how egali consciously professed egalitarians uh still act in ways that imply a bias against others and i think the reason we&#39;re less inclined those again from the center to recognize incongruities uh the incongruity between our professed ideals and our actual actions are the ideals of our country our nation the united states for instance and the lived experiences of most of the people in the country for most of our history the reason is because we don&#39;t have to and i think that&#39;s peggy mcintosh&#39;s who coins this term privilege white privilege in particular white male privilege to expand it i don&#39;t have to think about it and if i don&#39;t have to think about it i typically won&#39;t and it&#39;s easier there&#39;s a kind of cognitive ease in not thinking about these incongruities these dissonances that don&#39;t feel good what is beneficial about subversive humor is that it encourages us to to use george yancey&#39;s language carry along with the dissonance the incongruities because we get a reward that&#39;s the kind of mirth um in a way that a straightforward argument that tells me you are privileged you need to check your privilege here&#39;s why the direct argument here&#39;s the history here&#39;s the evidence it doesn&#39;t always work in fact it could turn the discussion in a different direction entirely from what you might intend in trying to reveal that look there are systematic problems with racism with stereotypes that that undermine or excuse me that undergird these uh systemic um inequalities um but i think the use of humor to get us to be aware of these incongruities can succeed where other direct methods don&#39;t because those with privilege are just simply less likely to recognize it and if i can borrow from louis c.k who is a fraught example here a difficult individual if you know the history of uck but his example here is very clear to the point i want to make one of his monologues from saturn live he mentions that uh american democracy is is only 94 years old this is back in 2014 or so uh i&#39;ve got i know three people in my building where i live who are older than american democracy now that just sounds false until you bring to consciousness at least three separate beliefs they can&#39;t all be true at the same time most people when they hear american democracy they think that&#39;s over 200 years old most people when they hear the word democracy admitting that there&#39;s degrees and different senses of democracy typically think that the majority of the eligible population the majority of the population should be allowed to vote but we also have the belief in our beliefs that women were granted the right to vote in 1920 which would have been about 94 years previous to when louis c.k made this this this bit the point is once those are all brought to consciousness if we&#39;re truly egalitarian individuals if we&#39;re truly interested in the truth are genuinely interested in the truth then we&#39;re going to have to amend our web of beliefs one of those beliefs has to go they can&#39;t all be true at the same time and the comedian is oftentimes very good um almost as a kind of cultural anthropologist of shining you know of revealing from within the culture a kind of alien perspective of it that forces us to see it in a way that we wouldn&#39;t otherwise because we probably don&#39;t want to as is the case with issues of incongruity and a kind of huge gap between what we profess and what is the reality but it gets us to think about these things indirectly with a playfulness an openness and then we realize well american democracy cannot be over 200 years old unless we want to define democracy in a way that does not include more than 50 of the population which of course was the case that&#39;s the point that louis c.k is making in a very short way much shorter than i just presented so again to sum up those with privilege and power are less inclined but they&#39;re less inclined and the subversive humor is trying to poke at that mirth addiction that we have and use it to raise consciousness and hopefully change minds can we please can we say that due to the um this sort of i mean i guess in subversive humor laughter is sort of second to humor i mean in other words i suppose you appreciate more the dissonance or these moments of difference or these moments of invading hypocrisy that happens through or cracks actually open through humor you prefer that to these collective or contagious experience of laughter i mean it seems that humor is more interesting to you than laughter well you laughter is not necessary certainly not sufficient for humor um and not everything that we read from frederick douglass or even richard pryor or dick gregory um or dave or dave chappelle is a new book on dave chappelle in philosophy um and i argue in that a chapter in that that dave chappelle uses positive propaganda against the negative propaganda that&#39;s been perpetuated in the united states for so long not all of it is is you know the falling type humor where you engage in laughter but one of the benefits of subversive humor that does lead to laughter is that it is contagious and that it spreads it&#39;s contagious laughter is contagious like yawning and when you&#39;re with a group of other people and you see this is perhaps even more this is very much the case with dave chappelle and it was the case with richard pryor where the audiences were very diverse and it&#39;s true with louis c case and others and that&#39;s relevant you have a number of people from all different cultural backgrounds experiencing the same [Music] performance and they&#39;re all laughing together uh and they&#39;re also with chappelle for example um receiving a message that is indirect um and you know i&#39;ll give an example from chappelle where he&#39;s got an audi the audience is again quite quite mixed um and he talks about the mundane experiences that he and people like him had this is like 2000 year 2000 with the police and uh chappelle is with his white friend chip who i&#39;ve never i&#39;ve never determined if he actually had a friend named chip who was a white dude named chip but that&#39;s not actually relevant because this could be seen as a thought experiment um but it&#39;s as true as any other experience that so many african-americans united states have experienced since 2000 and still today where they&#39;re driving along and they&#39;re high um and they get lost and chip is driving and he says uh oh it&#39;s the cops and then takes a long comfortable drag of the weed and says uh i&#39;m gonna go ask him for directions and to chappelle that&#39;s crazy don&#39;t do it and he gets out of the car he stumbles out walks over the car starts touching the officer uh excuse me he said you have to watch the i&#39;m not going to replay although i guess i am replaying the thing touching him where is third street or whatever and the officer says you&#39;re you&#39;re standing on third street now get out of here and chapelle says that&#39;s it that&#39;s all that happened um and he says something like now i know to some of you white folks there&#39;s not much to that story but you asked some of the black fellas here that is incredible and in this performance everyone is laughing but what he&#39;s doing is demonstrating again this is around 2000 here is a mundane experience an everyday experience uh in the in the quotidian so to speak as george yancey uses his term quotidian that uh african americans have to be hyper aware this goes back to your earlier question about recognizing incongruities chip doesn&#39;t have to be aware he can be blindly ignorant of how black people interact with the police and how they have to interact with people in positions of power and people in his situation have to be extraordinarily aware of how they&#39;re being perceived by other people um and you see this chris rock and his description of how he has to tell his kids as young as six and seven this is how you behave around police officers this is how you behave in grocery stores and convenience stores because you&#39;re being watched here&#39;s how you are being perceived by other people and it causes a kind of double consciousness as w.e.b du bois uses this phrase which is usually negative but not always those who are margins of society are in a sense forced to have an epistemic privilege in so far as being able to perceive how they are being perceived better than say white people because i don&#39;t have to i don&#39;t have to think about it it takes effort and i try to do so but i it&#39;s not a matter of survival for me to know what it&#39;s like to be seen by others for people like chappelle chris rock and others it is a matter of survival that they recognize how they&#39;re being perceived and how they comport themselves which is an additional burden that is involved with oppression and i don&#39;t have that burden at all and what chappelle is doing and in this case if you listen to the show he&#39;s people are laughing the whole time and that is contagious and i don&#39;t want to dismiss the contagious element of laughter i think that is in fact a large part of the human element that&#39;s beneficial that&#39;s not found to go back to your first question i think it was with most instances of irony right because i have a couple of more questions the other question the next question is that and then you seem to be a proponent of a kind of humor in incongruity theory you argue against the way that likes of john muriel understand and conclude the theory of humor or even sense of humor as something particularly individualistic and ignorant of power and privileges how is it could you please explain it right well first i should note i owe a huge debt to john morrell uh i think anyone who&#39;s in the philosophy of humor does um he&#39;s starting i guess 1980s maybe early 80s 80s um recognized that there was a dearth of philosophy i mean although it was discussed throughout the history most philosophers systematic philosophers address humor in some fashion plato aristotle nietzsche kant descartes i&#39;m going out of order of course um and morale i think deserves credit for making philosophy of humor a legitimate sub a legitimate discipline in philosophy um and i do agree with almost everything he says on the philosophy of humor almost um i think however using through the lens of gene harvey she has a wonderful critique of morale&#39;s conception of humor in her work civilized oppression her first chapter addresses this and i think my concern with morel&#39;s conception of humor isn&#39;t with necessarily incongruity but with um what he refers to as the disengaged notion that comes with with humor humor is the recognition of a non-threatening uh playful incongruity and it&#39;s a kind of sign of health that we can laugh and laugh at ourselves uh and there&#39;s a benefit to that but that goes back to your earlier question where our or we might see somebody depressed or or within a system of oppression we just you should be laughing you&#39;re demonstrating that you don&#39;t have a good sense of humor and that that&#39;s unhealthy and that&#39;s part of harvey&#39;s response to morel&#39;s sort of individualist approach to to humor um where it&#39;s a sign of of health and mental clarity and so forth i think it can be but um not all self-deprecating humor is a positive thing but my critique of morale is predominantly with respect to his notion that humor is not a mode of reaction to the real world it is a kind of joke world which is insulated from reality we have signals that we&#39;re just playing that it&#39;s purely for enjoyment and delight these are terms he&#39;ll use it over and over and largely that is often the case uh you know uh two muffins are in the oven the first one says wow it&#39;s like a sauna in here and the second muffin says holy a talking muffin that&#39;s purely frivolity that&#39;s pure for while that&#39;s funny uh where we&#39;re not engaged in trying to change the world in any practical way the serious perspective from morial morale excuse me names morale is one that&#39;s concerned with the here the now the practical the me whereas a humorous attitude separates from that uh and there i disagree i think one can be humorous and very much interested in changing the way the world is and in fact i think morel is inconsistent he&#39;ll say humor is to try and get people to laugh and it is not a bona fide mode of discourse in which you&#39;re trying to amend something in the world you&#39;re trying to accept it as it is not what&#39;s a verse of humor to do he gives an example a wonderful joke going back to the to nazi germany era where joseph goebbels the propaganda minister is asking young kids you know what are some good uh nationalistic slogans and one child says deutschland uber ales yes well done and uh there&#39;s a few others i&#39;ve forgotten and then he comes to the last child he says what is your slogan and the kid says our people will live forever ah very good says google&#39;s what is your name israel goldberg it was his name and so that&#39;s funny and it&#39;s subversive and and and um morale even uses an example of uh humor used to just to to avoid violence it&#39;s a wonderful example i hope it&#39;s true because it&#39;s fantastic uh abraham lincoln before he was president got into a duel was confronted with an individual and um lincoln was not good with firearms or swords apparently but at this period of time in history you if you were confronted by somebody who wanted to duel with you you had the option of choosing the weapon and the distance that you would engage in this and he said all right i&#39;ll get in this door with you but i get to choose the weapons and the other guy says okay fine and lincoln said cow at five paces and according to morel that&#39;s the end of the argument they didn&#39;t have to do it and maybe there you know lincoln lives to become president because of his use of humor their other example and that shows that it does more than just remain concealed in a web of a joke world and in similar ways philosophical thought experiments that are fictional they&#39;re not intended to remain in the fictional bubble they&#39;re intended to believe uh they&#39;re intended to be sort of contagious so to speak as tamar gender philosopher uses this term uh chris isn&#39;t it because you&#39;re not that much into i mean you talk a lot about incongruity and also you have you have incorporated a lot of elements from superiority theory of humor but isn&#39;t it i mean you&#39;re especially your reluctance to completely agree with john world&#39;s ideas of humor isn&#39;t it because you&#39;re not that much interested in the relief function of humor let&#39;s say i mean there are people um there are people at least like this bubble kind of relief uh theory of humor i mean there are there is a point of view um there are people like situate or there are people like who talks about the point of view of the universe or people like thomas snuggle talking about you from nowhere you know or you have even these these elements in in zen buddhism in sufism you know all these elements that you just through distancing i mean in persian poetry you have that even yeah through distancing from the world you have this you have this relief actually it shouldn&#39;t be humorous but if there is a relief yeah you can you can laugh at yourself so it seems that you&#39;re not that much into that abstract self-mockery ah very good uh well it was interesting you phrased it as self mockery um i i am interested in that and there&#39;s a i think we want to be cautious um oh her name just escapes me the australian i think she&#39;s from australia a new zealand comedian who uh was concerned about this what what oh her name i feel terrible i can&#39;t remember her name it&#39;s gonna come to me do you know what i&#39;m talking about she&#39;s yeah right yeah performance um because she&#39;s talking about very serious matters she argues and she&#39;s making more of a direct argument um than you would typically find in a stand-up performance i&#39;m sorry keep thinking of her name i&#39;ll let it come to me i&#39;ll do the taoist approach and let it bubble up and in her performance nanette it was called i think the first one she recognizes that her self-deprecating humor which she had utilized through mocha for most of her career in order to be accepted uh was crushing it wasn&#39;t self-mockery and it wasn&#39;t you know she made she came to the conclusion that it&#39;s either i use jokes i use stand up i use humor as a self-deprecating way without fully getting out my story and her story is a tough one or i have to eschew the comedy i have to get rid of the comedy and tell the full story because the comedy can&#39;t give at all and so i think she raises concerns about the problems of self-deprecating humor as of just pure release i would say relief theories i think are insufficient to describe humor i think straightforward incongruity theories are also insufficient to give you the necessary and sufficient conditions i&#39;m not concerned about necessary sufficient conditions i don&#39;t know that that&#39;s possible humor i think more of a vickinsteinian resemblance may make the most sense but to go back to an earlier point relief theories are useful in explaining our use of humor against the inevitabilities of death of living in existence that seems to uh not have any ultimate meaning purpose truth with the capital t and so forth there is a nichian kind of likeness that seems appropriate in response to that and that can provide us a distance from the world that seems to not have us in mind and in fact you could use and it is part of the psychological distance as a kind of salve for the individual who is being oppressed so the humor that victor frankl uses within the holocaust the concentration camps it is a mode of resistance but it&#39;s also a psychological boon you know to insulate right my argument is it&#39;s not just that and the humorist is not just for the psychological well-being of the individual though it can be and is often that but it is a mode of resistance and a tool of resistance um hopefully my last question um sorry i just have all i have today is the as a dentist which oh fun or funny so i don&#39;t mind if this goes over and i must that appointment i also had the dances like five hours ago your teeth look very good i&#39;m trying to hide mine i want to smile can&#39;t smile um the good thing about philosophers having tooth problem is that they look like intellectuals you know like you know the gesture would be like intellectuals so i have a question which is perhaps not best formulated but there is some there is some interest in that question that i have had more in germany than in iran again this switch and culture this between culture you know experience coming from iran living here and my god being exposed to [Music] a variety of different forms of humor in iran you know like as a survival mechanism in a lot of situations you know like from poverty to war to to sanctions to ahmadinejad you know all these were mechanisms for you to survive yeah and [Music] and then you come to a place like germany that humor is perhaps it&#39;s not the best place to or perhaps it is the best place to think and write about humor because there is not that much humor or perhaps it&#39;s a stereotype i don&#39;t know but they don&#39;t experience it that much um so my question that they were they were like backgrounds from my quest and my question is here that um um well of course as we both agree probably that there are preconceived notions about others like chinese women muslims handicaps gays and they make culturally available stereotypes yet the funny thing that i experienced mostly here i would say is that to produce subversive humor we should not and we cannot actually put an end to such a stereotypes by hiding them rather we need to use them in a conscious and critical way in order to to to generate that kind of subversive humor but something that i often experience here is that those stereotypes are actually hidden they are they are they are being hidden they are being you know the i&#39;m not sure if they don&#39;t exist because they i mean i i can&#39;t agree that overnight every stereotype just disappears but they are just concealed and that&#39;s the reason i think that there&#39;s not enough material to use or to generate subversive humor sometimes here because i mean the stereotypes are not allowed to be used even ah i see well what&#39;s an example i wouldn&#39;t i sorry i can&#39;t imagine um even in two decades a person likes lucike in german i think he toured there though yeah he does i mean he comes to berlin but i mean in german not in germany oh speaking in german i mean louis ck speaking in german with tiny comedy is for me hardly possible it is that&#39;s fascinating it is a stereotype i think about germany and germans um without a sense of humor i&#39;ll tell you though i have a friend who&#39;s from dusseldorf one of my best friends is a german if i can use that phrase it&#39;s funny yeah uh and he&#39;s he is a good sense of humor but actually i&#39;m not talking about sense of humor i&#39;m not talking about the ability to laugh i have also a lot of like i have a lot of german foreign um the the thing is that the role of stereotypes the role of conscious and critical utilization of stereotypes and cliches is a peace and power is a part and parcel of subversive humor and the absence in the absence of those stereotypes or in the hypocritic absence of proof i mean like if if you profess hypocritically that there are no such such stereotypes you cannot actually make subversive humor like lucy ah very good that is a tough one and in fact oh i&#39;m not good with names today did you come up with a name for nanette yet no not yet and i&#39;ll come back to that later i guess i can look it up now but i&#39;m not going to do it i&#39;m going to let my mind stew on it uh gregor benton i remember why this dude&#39;s name okay analyzes humor in soviet russia and he argues that humor is not a tool of revolutionaries or it&#39;s not revolutionary it doesn&#39;t work really um he says and and he says further it only exists subversive humor satire uh in so far as there is oppression and so far as there are stereotypes and you get rid of that you achieve equality guess what goes away and one response that is good i would do better we would all do better including comedians would be fine i think most comedians if you ask them would you rather the world be filled with equities so that you can have your subversive humor um uh or or or get rid of it all and then lose the subversive humor uh i think most would say i would i know dave chappelle would say i would prefer equality now if there&#39;s equality does that mean there&#39;s no more humor that is a different claim i think we wouldn&#39;t need subversive humor although people would find some reasons to say these people are doing these things and this is wrong it&#39;s just that the wrongness of it is not as consequential right there&#39;s a parallel in the philosophy of religion now why do we have compassion well because there&#39;s so much suffering in the world so does that mean i think in that case sorry christian i think in that case when we come to that equality the comedian would probably be would be busy with the cognitive incongruities rather than social or political incongruities right and and and that doesn&#39;t mean humor i don&#39;t think humor goes away regardless definitely but it would be a benefit it would be similar to compassion succeeding in somehow overcoming suffering say oh no there&#39;s no need for the virtue of compassion because what is heaven if not a place in which compassion is no longer it would be weird if you&#39;re in heaven you need to feel compassion for these people suffering in heaven well this is not my conception uh but of course i&#39;m not naive i don&#39;t think we&#39;re going to get socially politically to the situation in which subversive humor is no longer needed even though that might be the goal of subversive humorous sort of plenty of recognition this is the ideal here&#39;s what we need to do to fight as best we can toward that moral ideal knowing full well we&#39;re not going to get there 100 to assume that we can is kind of a spirit of seriousness as well it&#39;s a kind of seeking of an absolute and presuming that we&#39;ve achieved it is is is also problematic because it precludes the need for thinking further about it right i still i still believe that although i&#39;m not i shouldn&#39;t actually over generalize and i as i told you i&#39;m not talking about like individuals here i&#39;m talking about the the tendency that i think the tendency here for me is more ironic than humorous i mean when you&#39;re living in a in a in a society which is based on morality and democrat democracy and equality probably iron irony functions better than humor probably irony is more appreciated than humor you know yeah i think that&#39;s interesting i&#39;d have to think more about that again being in germany have you been there i&#39;m sorry have you been here uh i st in an airport for about an hour before going that&#39;s a joke yeah i didn&#39;t notice any dour-looking germans at the time i don&#39;t remember but i i think that is a stereotype but [Music] germany has an interesting history that&#39;s quite recent still is really not that long ago and i think that that mentality is not the idea and the concern of that i think germany dealt with their national sin in a way very differently than the united states with our multiple sins with respect to slavery and the genocide of indigenous peoples i know they even using the word genocide with respect to indigenous peoples united states is already politically fraught but if you look at the history it&#39;s hard to come up with a better term for that um yeah i really that&#39;s a that&#39;s a kind of cultural anthropological i think it&#39;s uh christy uh davies or kristen davies would be the source for that uh with respect to humor and how it&#39;s manifested in different cultures uh again with names i&#39;m not remembering names that i want to today i think it&#39;s kristin davies who you would look to i&#39;ll email you that&#39;s and i&#39;m still thinking of nanette it is totally lost to me we can take it later alexa who performs nanette oh the volume&#39;s too long alexa stop never mind sorry okay chris wonderful that was wonderful i mean talking to you getting to know you reading your book and uh i i really appreciate it i mean it was so clear so precise and even and also dense i mean reading the book it was a pleasure for me to read that [Music] you

[Music] so yeah thank you very much again chris for having accepted the invitation uh as i told you i usually start with some introductory notes about the person i&amp;#39;m interviewing but i just leave it up to you as a first question to introduce yourself and like your academic intellectual career or background let&amp;#39;s say sure uh and thank you for reaching out to me uh to speak with me about this um i know you&amp;#39;re interested in humor um and i am as well i got interested in thinking about humor i think probably if my parents aren&amp;#39;t lying to me when i was about five and i made my first joke it was a pun um we were eating scrambled eggs and i had the fork sort of on the teetering on the edge of the plate like a catapult the eggs were on the tines of the fork and i accidentally hit the supposedly accidental and the eggs flew everywhere and i said oh an explosion and my parents heard eggsplosion explosion okay explain to me the pun and i loved how it felt i i don&amp;#39;t remember i certainly didn&amp;#39;t create that joke it was i believe it&amp;#39;s called a spoonerism unintentional but from then on i started to understand what jokes were and of course i tried to make them and i loved the feeling that my family had and laughing at that moment and so that got me interested in humor i&amp;#39;d say since i was five and then i didn&amp;#39;t really come back to it so far as formal analysis until uh grad school uh i wanted to write about the philosophy of laughter um the my advisor suggested i not do that because it&amp;#39;s not marketable uh at the time that was probably reasonable this was around 1998 1999 so decided to cover go into consciousness studies but it wasn&amp;#39;t until grad school for the phd that i found connections between humor and um issues of political matters of christ say again which year was it like you&amp;#39;re you&amp;#39;re would have been 2009. all right around 2010 i took a political philosophy class and i was already interested in frederick douglass from my back history and in my i was a civil war buff which is a weird thing to i guess to admit uh but i was really interested in in frederick douglass and i was younger i would read freddie dallas i didn&amp;#39;t understand it but it it the things that he said pissed me off um in a way that the way he was treated the way he described being treated i it was didn&amp;#39;t didn&amp;#39;t sink in uh and it was in the later that i recognized he utilized humor uh frederick douglass he used humor in the worst situations possible being enslaved parallels to [Music] those who suffer through the the holocaust jewish prisoners victor frankel has a wonderful account of this in man&amp;#39;s search for meaning in those two situations and if you can find and use humor in situations like that and as a means to confront um violent systemic and constant oppression well then it seems there&amp;#39;s something more to just laughing there&amp;#39;s something more to humor than merely frivolity and that there i made a connection between and found an interest in um how humor can be used as a means to subvert uh certain kinds of oppression and this that my dissertation was on subversive humor but primarily against oppression that is uh what gene harvey calls civilized oppression it&amp;#39;s more covert it&amp;#39;s sort of hidden it&amp;#39;s implicit biases that are perpetuating and yet have um oftentimes as negative effects as overt and explicit oppression and anyway i was already working at the time so i was able to focus on what i wanted instead of you know picking something that would be marketable so i focused on philosophy of humor and i was very happy to have a chair of my dissertation be open to that and now i teach at uh santa barbara city college where it looks like this outside all right but are you also teaching humor like on humor philosophy humor there is not a class specific devoted to philosophy to philosophy of humor but i incorporate it in all of my classes so i&amp;#39;ll be teaching class on tuesday and the introduction of the class will be to introduce philosophy by way of a philosophical attitude with a humorous attitude um and i think because most people don&amp;#39;t know in the united states i&amp;#39;m not sure how it is in berlin but in the united states um philosophy is not a required subject in high school in fact most people don&amp;#39;t know what philosophy is including uh very public personalities politicians and so forth and i think this is a detriment so students coming in don&amp;#39;t even know what the word means ultimately uh but you know it&amp;#39;s not entirely their fault most philosophers debate about what the word means say again how about ethics i mean do you have like ethics courses and stuff oh yes yeah certainly yeah yeah all right and there&amp;#39;s connections there as well all right um so chris my question is that i mean like um even given your interest um in plenty of socio-political issues from power as you said to marginalization to oppression and uh so on and so forth why humor why not irony that&amp;#39;s a good question and i don&amp;#39;t think they&amp;#39;re always easily separable i think you could be ironic without being humorous not all irony is funny uh and not all humor is ironic uh but there or so i mentioned frederick douglass um i think there&amp;#39;s a there&amp;#39;s an appropriate time and place for the use of humor there&amp;#39;s an easy there&amp;#39;s a too easy let me rephrase it can be too easily misinterpreted as purely frivolous whereas irony can have a bit more biting edge and this fourth of july speech um you know this is this is 1850 i forgot the date it was before uh he was freed frederick douglass uh and the the the argument that he was giving is that he&amp;#39;s a human being and not not be treated as a slave but you can&amp;#39;t make that argument it&amp;#39;s absurd to have to publicly directly explicitly make an argument that i&amp;#39;m a human being and should be treated as such and he says in this speech this is not a time for argument this is a time for um scorching irony and it&amp;#39;s angry he&amp;#39;s he&amp;#39;s furious and justifiably so and so i i think i focused on humor because there wasn&amp;#39;t a whole lot of focus on it that&amp;#39;s one reason there&amp;#39;s there&amp;#39;s some work on irony and its use in political satire for instance but there&amp;#39;s something about humor that is more uh collaborative i think than um even many instances of irony i think you still find some collaboration with irony especially if you think of it in terms of socratic irony where you know the interlocutors are required to participate they&amp;#39;re required to uh give their view because socrates is not giving his for instance and there&amp;#39;s the socratic method in general where teachers try to pull out or reduce as the root of that term education is from socrates perspective but with humor it&amp;#39;s i think perhaps the most collaborative uh art form and i would call it an art form but as with a lot of art political art banksy type art for instance it isn&amp;#39;t just purely aesthetic and so that collaborative element is opens up others uh in a way that more direct approaches certainly direct argumentation and perhaps in many cases even irony is insufficient i increase there are lots of arguments about about the reasons um humor has been apparently excluded to logic to a large extent from the history of philosophy i mean philosophers are basically ironic and humorous and um [Music] one of the reasons is actually that the philosophers are serious and humorous by nature not a serious thing you agree with that um it depends if i can take give you a philosophical reaction aristotelian it depends it&amp;#39;s both yes and no depends on what you mean by uh sirius because the term is ambiguous um there&amp;#39;s a wonderful quote from virgin russell who if you look at a number of his quotes and i&amp;#39;ve forgotten who outlined this it may have been um stephen gimble it was a wonderful book on uh a new theory of philos of humor on cleverness um but he gives a list of comments um it may have been dworkin i can&amp;#39;t remember who it was now but a list of comments that russell makes that could stand as comedic performances and russell he was funny but is a very british dry wit uh he says the distinction between humor and seriousness or rather seriousness is not the opposite of humor uh being solemn that&amp;#39;s the opposite of humor so it is true philosophers are serious and they&amp;#39;re they take their uh they take their play with ideas if you want they take that place seriously and i think they take it seriously in a similar way that professional athletes take their playing their sport seriously musicians take their playing of their instruments and it is interesting john morrell i think put it wonderfully it&amp;#39;s it&amp;#39;s curious that musicians they play their instruments they don&amp;#39;t work them right we&amp;#39;re not working the sport we&amp;#39;re not working our instruments they&amp;#39;re they&amp;#39;re playing them but that play doesn&amp;#39;t necessitate frivolity lack of importance or seriousness so comedians who my goodness if you look at what goes into creating jokes it is it&amp;#39;s a very long arduous uh and serious practice and this is especially the case if the content of the humor is also uh you know issues of oppression if we go back to dick gregory richard pryor uh ellen claycorn element degeneres uh there&amp;#39;s any number of people you can look at oh they&amp;#39;re using uh humor in a meet as a means to address serious matters that doesn&amp;#39;t mean they&amp;#39;re being morose or solemn nor does it mean they&amp;#39;re bringing frittles see i don&amp;#39;t think it has to be either or and i think this is true of philosophers and particularly with thought experiments look at the history of thought experiments they are they&amp;#39;re not frivolous and they&amp;#39;re often about serious matters but there&amp;#39;s a bit of oftentimes humor and um playfulness involved with them because they&amp;#39;re playing with ideas effective the root of thought experiment uh the german root for it gadoken uh experiment or gedonken heel i guess is also sometimes used which is thought to play as as ernst mock i think referred to it and conducted spiel is just a fantastic word to say by itself it&amp;#39;s already a little bit light um and so no my law my short answer is no i do not agree that humor and seriousness are completely opposed all right um i could hear chris there are relatively clear legal remedies to over depression but it&amp;#39;s not the case with covert oppression where the psychological harms and results in legal and economic exclusion are every bit as real but caused by concealed mechanism subtly and systematically employed and of course does it mean that you believe humor can be a tool mainly or perhaps solely against covert oppression and can you please elaborate um yes uh let&amp;#39;s see i don&amp;#39;t think uh humor is only useful or efficacious against covert the hidden sorts the systemic uh again the civilized oppression oppression that&amp;#39;s perpetuated by well-meaning people i think it&amp;#39;s probably more effective with respect to that sort and that&amp;#39;s the sort i focus on in most of what i&amp;#39;ve written although frederick douglass again is not dealing with oh covert hidden oppressions he&amp;#39;s dealing with systemic violent in-your-face constant harms that are both psychological and physically tormenting and yet in his autobiographies in multiple instances he notes how he sees the importance of finding the funny side of life and and using humor as he did in a number of occasions in his speeches he uses humor in in a way that is potentially threatening to him it&amp;#39;s dangerous for someone in his situation in the 1850s 1860s and beyond even during reconstruction to um expose and critically uh evaluate and publicly do so uh those who are his oppressors and so he uses humor and there are a lot of instances in which humor seems to be successful um against the the overfort force of oppression in fact there are a number of cases where you look at how those who perpetuate overt in your face oppression like the nazis did feared humor and unfortunately we see this still today in turkey uh erdogan for instance who clearly fears humor i believe it was a couple years ago i think it was erdogan who tried to punish a german comedian if i&amp;#39;m not mistaken for making fun of him i mean this is this has a history to it there were joke courts i believe they were called in nazi germany where you could not make fun of adolf you couldn&amp;#39;t name your pets your dog or your horse adolf because that&amp;#39;s seen as diminishing him you couldn&amp;#39;t make jokes at adolf&amp;#39;s at hitler&amp;#39;s expense uh you could be punished and possibly even killed that shows at the very least the force of humor and and the use of humor even against the most explicit and violent sorts of oppression so again the short answer is no humor can be used and has been uh against as a resistance against overt and covert chris you call subversive humor that which is employed by or on behalf of those who have been continually marginalized when effectively use such humor i&amp;#39;m quoting you such humor can foster the inclination and even desire to listen to others and if only for brief moments adopt their point of view what constitutes actually subversive humor um i know that&amp;#39;s a big question that&amp;#39;s the whole phd thesis yes that can&amp;#39;t be summed up i mean i can i have subsequently rethought that or come back to that because the term sub verse of humor subversive implies a kind of undermining but it could also imply a reaction from those below so to speak you&amp;#39;re trying to subvert but it&amp;#39;s also coming from below you can think of it in terms of outside of the the margins of the borderlands of of a given society outside of the hegemonic centers and sometimes um and the way that i typically use it is um from those or on behalf of those who lack power um in the sort of slogan sense it&amp;#39;s a punching up versus a punching down and i think that phrase like most phrases that might have originally had a lot of force a lot of punch to it it began it gets overused and becomes almost cliche um i think that&amp;#39;s potentially problematic but ultimately that&amp;#39;s if you want to sum up what subversive humor is it&amp;#39;s it&amp;#39;s punching from below the problem is who gets to interpret that because there are those who are arguing they&amp;#39;re subverting you know unjust power structures that people who see themselves as being oppressed and they&amp;#39;re using humor as a means to attack those in power and currently what you find in the united states is a lot of white angry heterosexual males who see themselves as oppressed and you can see this online and they admit they&amp;#39;ll use uh humor to try to you know undermine the pa what they see as the power structures the problem here is they&amp;#39;re objectively mistaken about where the power lies they are objectively in the sense of there&amp;#39;s publicly available data that shows that they are not the ones who are being oppressed um and that gets into some also that gets into a lot of difficult terrain here because who gets to interpret that um and so i believe it was milo yiannopoulos if you&amp;#39;re familiar with this fellow he also takes on this mantle as being a kind of socratic gadfly which i found interesting uh and he sees himself as a subversive humorist and uh the problem is of course the use of humor that he employs is not one of bringing to consciousness stereotypes and then showing that they&amp;#39;re flawed and problematic and attempting to un undermine an unjust status quo the humor that he uses and many of those who are sometimes referred to as the alt-right in the united states it&amp;#39;s not used to demonstrate that stereotypes are flawed in fact it&amp;#39;s using them to maintain them it&amp;#39;s humor that&amp;#39;s used to perpetuate a status quo that actually benefits those who claim that they&amp;#39;re being oppressed and i think one of the if i can use another slogan i apologize because i don&amp;#39;t like slogans but this has become one for those who have experienced and have possessed privilege seeing equality the rising of equality feels like oppression i actually didn&amp;#39;t get that right but i think you know the the phrase i&amp;#39;m trying to say some people who have privilege and have had it for extended periods of time when they recognize others are now being granted similar basic rights that&amp;#39;s viewed as ah now my rights are being taken away i&amp;#39;m being oppressed uh and i think that&amp;#39;s largely where we are with a large segment of population united states today it&amp;#39;s like it&amp;#39;s a somewhat scary time all [Music] civilized oppression silence discredited stripped of powers of moral appeal and deprived of the interpersonal conditions necessary for maintaining self-respect i quote you subversive humor can raise consciousness about the lived experiences of those suffering under systemic oppression and foster world traveling subversive humor encourages audiences especially those who have contribute those who contribute to what john harvey calls civilized oppression to playfully travel across worlds and carry along with the perspectives of the marginalized is it an appropriate expectation for those marginalized or from those marginalized to incorporate humor in their liberation yes that&amp;#39;s an excellent question that&amp;#39;s another thing i&amp;#39;ve struggled with because again with humor there is embedded within it there&amp;#39;s ambiguity in most cases there&amp;#39;s um the need for audiences to participate in the understanding of what&amp;#39;s going on with most humor the humerus the wit whether it&amp;#39;s aversive or not is lying upon an audience sort of filling in and that&amp;#39;s again there&amp;#39;s the collaborative element of it which makes humor so interesting and so forceful and impactful but also it&amp;#39;s the potential worry because it could be misinterpreted very easily um by audiences and and by um third party bystanders to the extent that those are present there&amp;#39;s also the concern that when you are writing and thinking and perhaps even suggesting the use of humor as a mode of resistance that that could be interpreted as oh you seem to be saying that those who are systematically oppressed and systemically oppressed ought to just laugh it off ought to just as as douglas himself says you know find the funny side of it all um or immediately the monty python pops into mine always left the bright side of life i i think there&amp;#39;s a distinction i try to make that clear i&amp;#39;m mostly theorizing about how humor can has and can be utilized as a mode of resistance which is quite different than saying to an individual who is oppressed or depressed whatever the case in in that case as well that you should just turn that crown upside down and you should use laughter i think that&amp;#39;s very difficult terrain uh and i i don&amp;#39;t think i would point that out to somebody who is suffering that you should just use humor which of course doesn&amp;#39;t mean we shouldn&amp;#39;t be analyzing the way the humor can and has worked you just briefly talked about the different interpretations of different meanings of seriousness but um in a large part of your book uh subversive humor you talk about spirit of seriousness and i that it&amp;#39;s different from seriousness as we normally understand could you please um could you please um elaborate i mean you say the spirit of seriousness ontological expansiveness and stereotyping all play a central role in perpetuation of civilized oppression could you please um elaborate on this spirit of seriousness and his relation to this suppressive humor you&amp;#39;re defining yes i think that that is key here um in the concept of spirit of seriousness i get from jean-paul simon to bevoir louis gordon existentialist philosophers and there&amp;#39;s hints of it in friedrich nietzsche in his spirit of gravity and nietzsche&amp;#39;s conception of use of levity and lightheartedness in response to that but it goes back even further i think to arthur schopenhauer of all people and if you just look at a picture of arthur schopenhauer any picture about the schopenhauer humor uh and that face are incongruous that he he actually focused on humor uh and one of the conceptions he sees of humor has a benefit it is a kind of recognition of the limits of our reason and he sees the serious person against whom a lot of humor is a tool to crack open the serious person is not the one who is solemn it&amp;#39;s not the one who is you know this is important and i i need you know stop bothering me with this frivolity i&amp;#39;m taking this as very significant to me but the serious person for schopenhauer is one who feels overly certain and unjustifiably certain that the way they perceive the world concepts through which they perceive the world are absolute unquestioned that kind of seriousness is what i think people like simone de bevoir jean-paul sartre and lewis gordon referred to as a kind of absolutism maybe you can refer to it as dogmatism it is an unquestioned attitude where we look for and rationalize our experiences in the world deny uh the perspectives of others whenever they might come in conflict with our presumed values which we take to either be absolute because of nature absolute because of god which is often the case or even absolute due to to culture uh and the spirit of seriousness is something that dis inclines us to see from alternative perspectives and a humorous attitude goes the opposite direction um think of the spirit of seriousness as tied to tragedy versus a kind of a humorous attitude tied with this openness of comedy of divergent thinking as opposed to convergent thinking john morrell has a wonderful take on this um in his work on comedy and tragedy and humor or laughter where he delineates the distinction in a comedic and a tragic world view um and so one of the things that humorists can do is is reveal that the hierarchical structures the societal structures the rules that are set in place are not absolute and they&amp;#39;re not absolute because there&amp;#39;s a history to them they&amp;#39;re contingent as opposed to necessary but what de bevoir says simone de bevoir in the ethics of ambiguity which i think is still very relevant text for today what the oppressor does and when the oppressor succeeds is to get the oppressed to perceive their situation as if it were a natural state as if it were as if it couldn&amp;#39;t be questioned um uh as if it were like an earthquake or a tornado you&amp;#39;re not oppressed by tornadoes oppression is how humans interact with other humans but if you make your situation your status in life um wherever you are as a kind of necessity invoked either by brought about either by the laws of nature or it&amp;#39;s a kind of supernatural mystification as you as as i would put it from god then it cannot be questioned because and in that sense you get the oppressed to accept and not question their situation uh plato comes to mind with his myth of the medals this is just how you&amp;#39;re born and there&amp;#39;s nothing that can be done about it it&amp;#39;s not human actions that have put you in this oppressive state it&amp;#39;s just the natural state of the world um we might see a version of this with the caste system in india for example as well and the humorist is pointing out that this is all contingent it&amp;#39;s not necessary and if it&amp;#39;s contingent and not necessary then it can be it could be changed it could be amended and here you have a distinction um uh with subversive humor and humor that might be considered gallows humor humor in response to we&amp;#39;re talking about existentialists the inevitability of death a lot of you know woody allen films for instance a kind of existentialist dread uh and his humor is a response to that that&amp;#39;s not subversive humor because the subversive humor humorist is using um lightheartedness playfulness to change something in the world the humorist who&amp;#39;s addressing the another inevitability of death is using that to change their mindset their psychological reaction to an inevitability but if you can make one&amp;#39;s position in society seem inevitable there&amp;#39;s no reason then there&amp;#39;s no hope uh for one to try to undermine it or change it sure proof based on that based on this and this definition of this spirit of seriousness all that you uh very clearly talked about now and just um in the in the book can we come to a correlation between or let me reformulate it like subversive humor confront serious matters but in a playful manner that fosters creative and critical thinking and cultivates a desire and school skill for recognizing and quoting you for recognizing incongruities between our prefers ideals and a reality that does not meet those standards and of course are those in power then necessarily more serious and less sensitive to incongruities ah yes very very good question there&amp;#39;s a lot of hmm there are a lot of different routes to answer that uh i&amp;#39;ll try to go a shorter route yes they those with power those with privilege those in the center of a society are typically less inclined to recognize incongruities and hear incongruities in the sense of moral social incongruities dealing with questions of justice and the reason that is it&amp;#39;s not and by the way i&amp;#39;m not going to engage in the spirit of seriousness myself by saying if one is in a position of power they&amp;#39;re constitutionally incapable of recognizing incongruity because to do so again i think would fit that kind of absolutist perspective and it would it would undermine the efficacy of subversive humor which one of the goals of subversive humor is to change the minds of other people in particular those with power and so the reason subversive humor against co covert hidden oppression civilized oppression i think is such a useful tool is because the people who are perpetuating oppressive systems if you ask them uh most of us today and i include i said us here because i think i&amp;#39;m part of that um dominant group in the sense that i&amp;#39;m privileged in many respects but we [Music] if asked would say i&amp;#39;m an egalitarian i&amp;#39;m for equal rights for everyone i&amp;#39;m against oppression i&amp;#39;m against racism and yet our actions uh belie that our actions are implicit biases and i&amp;#39;ve taken the implicit association test and i was not happy with the results um my and there&amp;#39;s a number of studies that show how egali consciously professed egalitarians uh still act in ways that imply a bias against others and i think the reason we&amp;#39;re less inclined those again from the center to recognize incongruities uh the incongruity between our professed ideals and our actual actions are the ideals of our country our nation the united states for instance and the lived experiences of most of the people in the country for most of our history the reason is because we don&amp;#39;t have to and i think that&amp;#39;s peggy mcintosh&amp;#39;s who coins this term privilege white privilege in particular white male privilege to expand it i don&amp;#39;t have to think about it and if i don&amp;#39;t have to think about it i typically won&amp;#39;t and it&amp;#39;s easier there&amp;#39;s a kind of cognitive ease in not thinking about these incongruities these dissonances that don&amp;#39;t feel good what is beneficial about subversive humor is that it encourages us to to use george yancey&amp;#39;s language carry along with the dissonance the incongruities because we get a reward that&amp;#39;s the kind of mirth um in a way that a straightforward argument that tells me you are privileged you need to check your privilege here&amp;#39;s why the direct argument here&amp;#39;s the history here&amp;#39;s the evidence it doesn&amp;#39;t always work in fact it could turn the discussion in a different direction entirely from what you might intend in trying to reveal that look there are systematic problems with racism with stereotypes that that undermine or excuse me that undergird these uh systemic um inequalities um but i think the use of humor to get us to be aware of these incongruities can succeed where other direct methods don&amp;#39;t because those with privilege are just simply less likely to recognize it and if i can borrow from louis c.k who is a fraught example here a difficult individual if you know the history of uck but his example here is very clear to the point i want to make one of his monologues from saturn live he mentions that uh american democracy is is only 94 years old this is back in 2014 or so uh i&amp;#39;ve got i know three people in my building where i live who are older than american democracy now that just sounds false until you bring to consciousness at least three separate beliefs they can&amp;#39;t all be true at the same time most people when they hear american democracy they think that&amp;#39;s over 200 years old most people when they hear the word democracy admitting that there&amp;#39;s degrees and different senses of democracy typically think that the majority of the eligible population the majority of the population should be allowed to vote but we also have the belief in our beliefs that women were granted the right to vote in 1920 which would have been about 94 years previous to when louis c.k made this this this bit the point is once those are all brought to consciousness if we&amp;#39;re truly egalitarian individuals if we&amp;#39;re truly interested in the truth are genuinely interested in the truth then we&amp;#39;re going to have to amend our web of beliefs one of those beliefs has to go they can&amp;#39;t all be true at the same time and the comedian is oftentimes very good um almost as a kind of cultural anthropologist of shining you know of revealing from within the culture a kind of alien perspective of it that forces us to see it in a way that we wouldn&amp;#39;t otherwise because we probably don&amp;#39;t want to as is the case with issues of incongruity and a kind of huge gap between what we profess and what is the reality but it gets us to think about these things indirectly with a playfulness an openness and then we realize well american democracy cannot be over 200 years old unless we want to define democracy in a way that does not include more than 50 of the population which of course was the case that&amp;#39;s the point that louis c.k is making in a very short way much shorter than i just presented so again to sum up those with privilege and power are less inclined but they&amp;#39;re less inclined and the subversive humor is trying to poke at that mirth addiction that we have and use it to raise consciousness and hopefully change minds can we please can we say that due to the um this sort of i mean i guess in subversive humor laughter is sort of second to humor i mean in other words i suppose you appreciate more the dissonance or these moments of difference or these moments of invading hypocrisy that happens through or cracks actually open through humor you prefer that to these collective or contagious experience of laughter i mean it seems that humor is more interesting to you than laughter well you laughter is not necessary certainly not sufficient for humor um and not everything that we read from frederick douglass or even richard pryor or dick gregory um or dave or dave chappelle is a new book on dave chappelle in philosophy um and i argue in that a chapter in that that dave chappelle uses positive propaganda against the negative propaganda that&amp;#39;s been perpetuated in the united states for so long not all of it is is you know the falling type humor where you engage in laughter but one of the benefits of subversive humor that does lead to laughter is that it is contagious and that it spreads it&amp;#39;s contagious laughter is contagious like yawning and when you&amp;#39;re with a group of other people and you see this is perhaps even more this is very much the case with dave chappelle and it was the case with richard pryor where the audiences were very diverse and it&amp;#39;s true with louis c case and others and that&amp;#39;s relevant you have a number of people from all different cultural backgrounds experiencing the same [Music] performance and they&amp;#39;re all laughing together uh and they&amp;#39;re also with chappelle for example um receiving a message that is indirect um and you know i&amp;#39;ll give an example from chappelle where he&amp;#39;s got an audi the audience is again quite quite mixed um and he talks about the mundane experiences that he and people like him had this is like 2000 year 2000 with the police and uh chappelle is with his white friend chip who i&amp;#39;ve never i&amp;#39;ve never determined if he actually had a friend named chip who was a white dude named chip but that&amp;#39;s not actually relevant because this could be seen as a thought experiment um but it&amp;#39;s as true as any other experience that so many african-americans united states have experienced since 2000 and still today where they&amp;#39;re driving along and they&amp;#39;re high um and they get lost and chip is driving and he says uh oh it&amp;#39;s the cops and then takes a long comfortable drag of the weed and says uh i&amp;#39;m gonna go ask him for directions and to chappelle that&amp;#39;s crazy don&amp;#39;t do it and he gets out of the car he stumbles out walks over the car starts touching the officer uh excuse me he said you have to watch the i&amp;#39;m not going to replay although i guess i am replaying the thing touching him where is third street or whatever and the officer says you&amp;#39;re you&amp;#39;re standing on third street now get out of here and chapelle says that&amp;#39;s it that&amp;#39;s all that happened um and he says something like now i know to some of you white folks there&amp;#39;s not much to that story but you asked some of the black fellas here that is incredible and in this performance everyone is laughing but what he&amp;#39;s doing is demonstrating again this is around 2000 here is a mundane experience an everyday experience uh in the in the quotidian so to speak as george yancey uses his term quotidian that uh african americans have to be hyper aware this goes back to your earlier question about recognizing incongruities chip doesn&amp;#39;t have to be aware he can be blindly ignorant of how black people interact with the police and how they have to interact with people in positions of power and people in his situation have to be extraordinarily aware of how they&amp;#39;re being perceived by other people um and you see this chris rock and his description of how he has to tell his kids as young as six and seven this is how you behave around police officers this is how you behave in grocery stores and convenience stores because you&amp;#39;re being watched here&amp;#39;s how you are being perceived by other people and it causes a kind of double consciousness as w.e.b du bois uses this phrase which is usually negative but not always those who are margins of society are in a sense forced to have an epistemic privilege in so far as being able to perceive how they are being perceived better than say white people because i don&amp;#39;t have to i don&amp;#39;t have to think about it it takes effort and i try to do so but i it&amp;#39;s not a matter of survival for me to know what it&amp;#39;s like to be seen by others for people like chappelle chris rock and others it is a matter of survival that they recognize how they&amp;#39;re being perceived and how they comport themselves which is an additional burden that is involved with oppression and i don&amp;#39;t have that burden at all and what chappelle is doing and in this case if you listen to the show he&amp;#39;s people are laughing the whole time and that is contagious and i don&amp;#39;t want to dismiss the contagious element of laughter i think that is in fact a large part of the human element that&amp;#39;s beneficial that&amp;#39;s not found to go back to your first question i think it was with most instances of irony right because i have a couple of more questions the other question the next question is that and then you seem to be a proponent of a kind of humor in incongruity theory you argue against the way that likes of john muriel understand and conclude the theory of humor or even sense of humor as something particularly individualistic and ignorant of power and privileges how is it could you please explain it right well first i should note i owe a huge debt to john morrell uh i think anyone who&amp;#39;s in the philosophy of humor does um he&amp;#39;s starting i guess 1980s maybe early 80s 80s um recognized that there was a dearth of philosophy i mean although it was discussed throughout the history most philosophers systematic philosophers address humor in some fashion plato aristotle nietzsche kant descartes i&amp;#39;m going out of order of course um and morale i think deserves credit for making philosophy of humor a legitimate sub a legitimate discipline in philosophy um and i do agree with almost everything he says on the philosophy of humor almost um i think however using through the lens of gene harvey she has a wonderful critique of morale&amp;#39;s conception of humor in her work civilized oppression her first chapter addresses this and i think my concern with morel&amp;#39;s conception of humor isn&amp;#39;t with necessarily incongruity but with um what he refers to as the disengaged notion that comes with with humor humor is the recognition of a non-threatening uh playful incongruity and it&amp;#39;s a kind of sign of health that we can laugh and laugh at ourselves uh and there&amp;#39;s a benefit to that but that goes back to your earlier question where our or we might see somebody depressed or or within a system of oppression we just you should be laughing you&amp;#39;re demonstrating that you don&amp;#39;t have a good sense of humor and that that&amp;#39;s unhealthy and that&amp;#39;s part of harvey&amp;#39;s response to morel&amp;#39;s sort of individualist approach to to humor um where it&amp;#39;s a sign of of health and mental clarity and so forth i think it can be but um not all self-deprecating humor is a positive thing but my critique of morale is predominantly with respect to his notion that humor is not a mode of reaction to the real world it is a kind of joke world which is insulated from reality we have signals that we&amp;#39;re just playing that it&amp;#39;s purely for enjoyment and delight these are terms he&amp;#39;ll use it over and over and largely that is often the case uh you know uh two muffins are in the oven the first one says wow it&amp;#39;s like a sauna in here and the second muffin says holy a talking muffin that&amp;#39;s purely frivolity that&amp;#39;s pure for while that&amp;#39;s funny uh where we&amp;#39;re not engaged in trying to change the world in any practical way the serious perspective from morial morale excuse me names morale is one that&amp;#39;s concerned with the here the now the practical the me whereas a humorous attitude separates from that uh and there i disagree i think one can be humorous and very much interested in changing the way the world is and in fact i think morel is inconsistent he&amp;#39;ll say humor is to try and get people to laugh and it is not a bona fide mode of discourse in which you&amp;#39;re trying to amend something in the world you&amp;#39;re trying to accept it as it is not what&amp;#39;s a verse of humor to do he gives an example a wonderful joke going back to the to nazi germany era where joseph goebbels the propaganda minister is asking young kids you know what are some good uh nationalistic slogans and one child says deutschland uber ales yes well done and uh there&amp;#39;s a few others i&amp;#39;ve forgotten and then he comes to the last child he says what is your slogan and the kid says our people will live forever ah very good says google&amp;#39;s what is your name israel goldberg it was his name and so that&amp;#39;s funny and it&amp;#39;s subversive and and and um morale even uses an example of uh humor used to just to to avoid violence it&amp;#39;s a wonderful example i hope it&amp;#39;s true because it&amp;#39;s fantastic uh abraham lincoln before he was president got into a duel was confronted with an individual and um lincoln was not good with firearms or swords apparently but at this period of time in history you if you were confronted by somebody who wanted to duel with you you had the option of choosing the weapon and the distance that you would engage in this and he said all right i&amp;#39;ll get in this door with you but i get to choose the weapons and the other guy says okay fine and lincoln said cow at five paces and according to morel that&amp;#39;s the end of the argument they didn&amp;#39;t have to do it and maybe there you know lincoln lives to become president because of his use of humor their other example and that shows that it does more than just remain concealed in a web of a joke world and in similar ways philosophical thought experiments that are fictional they&amp;#39;re not intended to remain in the fictional bubble they&amp;#39;re intended to believe uh they&amp;#39;re intended to be sort of contagious so to speak as tamar gender philosopher uses this term uh chris isn&amp;#39;t it because you&amp;#39;re not that much into i mean you talk a lot about incongruity and also you have you have incorporated a lot of elements from superiority theory of humor but isn&amp;#39;t it i mean you&amp;#39;re especially your reluctance to completely agree with john world&amp;#39;s ideas of humor isn&amp;#39;t it because you&amp;#39;re not that much interested in the relief function of humor let&amp;#39;s say i mean there are people um there are people at least like this bubble kind of relief uh theory of humor i mean there are there is a point of view um there are people like situate or there are people like who talks about the point of view of the universe or people like thomas snuggle talking about you from nowhere you know or you have even these these elements in in zen buddhism in sufism you know all these elements that you just through distancing i mean in persian poetry you have that even yeah through distancing from the world you have this you have this relief actually it shouldn&amp;#39;t be humorous but if there is a relief yeah you can you can laugh at yourself so it seems that you&amp;#39;re not that much into that abstract self-mockery ah very good uh well it was interesting you phrased it as self mockery um i i am interested in that and there&amp;#39;s a i think we want to be cautious um oh her name just escapes me the australian i think she&amp;#39;s from australia a new zealand comedian who uh was concerned about this what what oh her name i feel terrible i can&amp;#39;t remember her name it&amp;#39;s gonna come to me do you know what i&amp;#39;m talking about she&amp;#39;s yeah right yeah performance um because she&amp;#39;s talking about very serious matters she argues and she&amp;#39;s making more of a direct argument um than you would typically find in a stand-up performance i&amp;#39;m sorry keep thinking of her name i&amp;#39;ll let it come to me i&amp;#39;ll do the taoist approach and let it bubble up and in her performance nanette it was called i think the first one she recognizes that her self-deprecating humor which she had utilized through mocha for most of her career in order to be accepted uh was crushing it wasn&amp;#39;t self-mockery and it wasn&amp;#39;t you know she made she came to the conclusion that it&amp;#39;s either i use jokes i use stand up i use humor as a self-deprecating way without fully getting out my story and her story is a tough one or i have to eschew the comedy i have to get rid of the comedy and tell the full story because the comedy can&amp;#39;t give at all and so i think she raises concerns about the problems of self-deprecating humor as of just pure release i would say relief theories i think are insufficient to describe humor i think straightforward incongruity theories are also insufficient to give you the necessary and sufficient conditions i&amp;#39;m not concerned about necessary sufficient conditions i don&amp;#39;t know that that&amp;#39;s possible humor i think more of a vickinsteinian resemblance may make the most sense but to go back to an earlier point relief theories are useful in explaining our use of humor against the inevitabilities of death of living in existence that seems to uh not have any ultimate meaning purpose truth with the capital t and so forth there is a nichian kind of likeness that seems appropriate in response to that and that can provide us a distance from the world that seems to not have us in mind and in fact you could use and it is part of the psychological distance as a kind of salve for the individual who is being oppressed so the humor that victor frankl uses within the holocaust the concentration camps it is a mode of resistance but it&amp;#39;s also a psychological boon you know to insulate right my argument is it&amp;#39;s not just that and the humorist is not just for the psychological well-being of the individual though it can be and is often that but it is a mode of resistance and a tool of resistance um hopefully my last question um sorry i just have all i have today is the as a dentist which oh fun or funny so i don&amp;#39;t mind if this goes over and i must that appointment i also had the dances like five hours ago your teeth look very good i&amp;#39;m trying to hide mine i want to smile can&amp;#39;t smile um the good thing about philosophers having tooth problem is that they look like intellectuals you know like you know the gesture would be like intellectuals so i have a question which is perhaps not best formulated but there is some there is some interest in that question that i have had more in germany than in iran again this switch and culture this between culture you know experience coming from iran living here and my god being exposed to [Music] a variety of different forms of humor in iran you know like as a survival mechanism in a lot of situations you know like from poverty to war to to sanctions to ahmadinejad you know all these were mechanisms for you to survive yeah and [Music] and then you come to a place like germany that humor is perhaps it&amp;#39;s not the best place to or perhaps it is the best place to think and write about humor because there is not that much humor or perhaps it&amp;#39;s a stereotype i don&amp;#39;t know but they don&amp;#39;t experience it that much um so my question that they were they were like backgrounds from my quest and my question is here that um um well of course as we both agree probably that there are preconceived notions about others like chinese women muslims handicaps gays and they make culturally available stereotypes yet the funny thing that i experienced mostly here i would say is that to produce subversive humor we should not and we cannot actually put an end to such a stereotypes by hiding them rather we need to use them in a conscious and critical way in order to to to generate that kind of subversive humor but something that i often experience here is that those stereotypes are actually hidden they are they are they are being hidden they are being you know the i&amp;#39;m not sure if they don&amp;#39;t exist because they i mean i i can&amp;#39;t agree that overnight every stereotype just disappears but they are just concealed and that&amp;#39;s the reason i think that there&amp;#39;s not enough material to use or to generate subversive humor sometimes here because i mean the stereotypes are not allowed to be used even ah i see well what&amp;#39;s an example i wouldn&amp;#39;t i sorry i can&amp;#39;t imagine um even in two decades a person likes lucike in german i think he toured there though yeah he does i mean he comes to berlin but i mean in german not in germany oh speaking in german i mean louis ck speaking in german with tiny comedy is for me hardly possible it is that&amp;#39;s fascinating it is a stereotype i think about germany and germans um without a sense of humor i&amp;#39;ll tell you though i have a friend who&amp;#39;s from dusseldorf one of my best friends is a german if i can use that phrase it&amp;#39;s funny yeah uh and he&amp;#39;s he is a good sense of humor but actually i&amp;#39;m not talking about sense of humor i&amp;#39;m not talking about the ability to laugh i have also a lot of like i have a lot of german foreign um the the thing is that the role of stereotypes the role of conscious and critical utilization of stereotypes and cliches is a peace and power is a part and parcel of subversive humor and the absence in the absence of those stereotypes or in the hypocritic absence of proof i mean like if if you profess hypocritically that there are no such such stereotypes you cannot actually make subversive humor like lucy ah very good that is a tough one and in fact oh i&amp;#39;m not good with names today did you come up with a name for nanette yet no not yet and i&amp;#39;ll come back to that later i guess i can look it up now but i&amp;#39;m not going to do it i&amp;#39;m going to let my mind stew on it uh gregor benton i remember why this dude&amp;#39;s name okay analyzes humor in soviet russia and he argues that humor is not a tool of revolutionaries or it&amp;#39;s not revolutionary it doesn&amp;#39;t work really um he says and and he says further it only exists subversive humor satire uh in so far as there is oppression and so far as there are stereotypes and you get rid of that you achieve equality guess what goes away and one response that is good i would do better we would all do better including comedians would be fine i think most comedians if you ask them would you rather the world be filled with equities so that you can have your subversive humor um uh or or or get rid of it all and then lose the subversive humor uh i think most would say i would i know dave chappelle would say i would prefer equality now if there&amp;#39;s equality does that mean there&amp;#39;s no more humor that is a different claim i think we wouldn&amp;#39;t need subversive humor although people would find some reasons to say these people are doing these things and this is wrong it&amp;#39;s just that the wrongness of it is not as consequential right there&amp;#39;s a parallel in the philosophy of religion now why do we have compassion well because there&amp;#39;s so much suffering in the world so does that mean i think in that case sorry christian i think in that case when we come to that equality the comedian would probably be would be busy with the cognitive incongruities rather than social or political incongruities right and and and that doesn&amp;#39;t mean humor i don&amp;#39;t think humor goes away regardless definitely but it would be a benefit it would be similar to compassion succeeding in somehow overcoming suffering say oh no there&amp;#39;s no need for the virtue of compassion because what is heaven if not a place in which compassion is no longer it would be weird if you&amp;#39;re in heaven you need to feel compassion for these people suffering in heaven well this is not my conception uh but of course i&amp;#39;m not naive i don&amp;#39;t think we&amp;#39;re going to get socially politically to the situation in which subversive humor is no longer needed even though that might be the goal of subversive humorous sort of plenty of recognition this is the ideal here&amp;#39;s what we need to do to fight as best we can toward that moral ideal knowing full well we&amp;#39;re not going to get there 100 to assume that we can is kind of a spirit of seriousness as well it&amp;#39;s a kind of seeking of an absolute and presuming that we&amp;#39;ve achieved it is is is also problematic because it precludes the need for thinking further about it right i still i still believe that although i&amp;#39;m not i shouldn&amp;#39;t actually over generalize and i as i told you i&amp;#39;m not talking about like individuals here i&amp;#39;m talking about the the tendency that i think the tendency here for me is more ironic than humorous i mean when you&amp;#39;re living in a in a in a society which is based on morality and democrat democracy and equality probably iron irony functions better than humor probably irony is more appreciated than humor you know yeah i think that&amp;#39;s interesting i&amp;#39;d have to think more about that again being in germany have you been there i&amp;#39;m sorry have you been here uh i st in an airport for about an hour before going that&amp;#39;s a joke yeah i didn&amp;#39;t notice any dour-looking germans at the time i don&amp;#39;t remember but i i think that is a stereotype but [Music] germany has an interesting history that&amp;#39;s quite recent still is really not that long ago and i think that that mentality is not the idea and the concern of that i think germany dealt with their national sin in a way very differently than the united states with our multiple sins with respect to slavery and the genocide of indigenous peoples i know they even using the word genocide with respect to indigenous peoples united states is already politically fraught but if you look at the history it&amp;#39;s hard to come up with a better term for that um yeah i really that&amp;#39;s a that&amp;#39;s a kind of cultural anthropological i think it&amp;#39;s uh christy uh davies or kristen davies would be the source for that uh with respect to humor and how it&amp;#39;s manifested in different cultures uh again with names i&amp;#39;m not remembering names that i want to today i think it&amp;#39;s kristin davies who you would look to i&amp;#39;ll email you that&amp;#39;s and i&amp;#39;m still thinking of nanette it is totally lost to me we can take it later alexa who performs nanette oh the volume&amp;#39;s too long alexa stop never mind sorry okay chris wonderful that was wonderful i mean talking to you getting to know you reading your book and uh i i really appreciate it i mean it was so clear so precise and even and also dense i mean reading the book it was a pleasure for me to read that [Music] you

Transcript for:Lecture on Subversive Humor and Philosophy

Transcript for:
Lecture on Subversive Humor and Philosophy